Pseudonymous laptop science scholar “Ersei” has created a Linux system that makes use of a Google Drive cloud storage system as its boot machine.
“Competitiveness is a vice of mine. After I heard {that a} good friend received Linux as well off of NFS [Network File System], I needed to one-up her,” Ersei explains. “I needed to show that I may create one thing tougher, one thing higher, sooner, stronger. “On the point of madness, my tattered thoughts unable to understand the twisted interaction of millennia of arcane programmer-time and the ragged screech of insanity, I reached into the Mass and steeled myself to the bottom lest I be pulled in, and located my magnum opus. Booting Linux off of a Google Drive root.”
For those who’ve received a Linux-capable system with no storage, why not strive booting it from Google Drive? (📷: Ersei)
Google Drive, launched again in 2012, is designed to permit customers to retailer recordsdata — each these created on and edited by Google’s productiveness apps together with Google Docs and people made elsewhere. With a claimed consumer rely of over a billion and trillions of recordsdata saved, it is common — however, to the very best of Ersei’s and our mixed data, has by no means been used as a boot machine for an working system.
“I wished this to stay self-contained, so I could not have a second machine act as a ‘helper,'” Ersei explains of the method. “My thoughts went instantly to FUSE [Filesystem in Userspace] — a program that acts as a filesystem driver in userspace (with cooperation from the kernel). I simply needed to get FUSE applications put in within the Linux kernel initramfs and configure networking. How dangerous may it’s?”
The method wasn’t precisely clean crusing, and even in its “completed” state not every thing works. (📷: Ersei)
The reply, maybe unsurprisingly, is “fairly dangerous” — however not not possible. Ersei received the system, based mostly on the Arch Linux distribution, operating regionally as a proof-of-concept first, then set about porting it to Google Drive. After numerous tinkering, boot was achieved — even utilizing a tool with no storage of its personal. There are, nevertheless, caveats: it is gradual, symbolic and onerous linking do not work accurately, and permissions and attributes aren’t recorded.
“Regardless of how foolish this undertaking is, there are just a few less-silly makes use of I can consider, like booting Linux off of SSH [Secure Shell],” Ersei proposes, “or maybe booting Linux off of a Git repository and monitoring each change in Git utilizing gitfs. The probabilities are limitless, regardless of the middling usefulness.”
The total undertaking write-up is offered on Ersei’s weblog.